What led Roposo to pause its live shows on Diwali?

This year’s festive season was different, as compared to the last two ones. People were able to celebrate Diwali and other festivals with their loved ones.

Roposo, a creator-led live entertainment commerce platform, through its Diwali campaign #FestivalofLive, wanted to drive the sentiment that every festival becomes extra special when it is spent with family and friends.

The platform reached out to the ‘Gen-now’ to convey the message that no amount of texts or calls can measure up to the warmth and joy of spending quality time with your loved ones.

Speaking about the campaign, Mansi Jain, senior vice president and general manager, Roposo, says, “Given that Roposo is equal to ‘live’, we felt that the beauty of live is the connections that you’re able to make, which can’t be done over a video call. And, that is where ‘live’ stands, as it helps the users to interact more deeply.”

Roposo paused its live shows for over 12 hours on Diwali to enable its streamers to spend time with their near and dear ones. It encouraged its users also to do the same.

The campaign was created in-house. Jain says that Roposo wanted to strike a chord with its users and streamers by not making it ‘super fancy’ and keeping it real. So, the brand decided to show simple stories of how the creators wished to celebrate Diwali.

Launched as a short video app in November 2014, Roposo was acquired by Glance in 2019. At that point, Jain reveals, Roposo felt that the next wave of content consumption would come from ‘live’. This was further accelerated by the COVID pandemic, because people started to consume content on their mobile phones in real time.

This was before TikTok was banned in India. Post the ban, short-form video started to become a commodity and there was less differentiation from the purview of the consumers.

As per Jain, “‘Shoptainment’, as a proposition, is going to change the way the consumers shop. Online shopping is massive in India, but Gen Z is not driven by intent today. Rather, they are more involved in impulse and inspiration-led shopping behaviour. Roposo’s live platform is able to create that ‘shoptainment’ space for this target audience.”

Roposo’s TG majorly consists of users in the 18-25 age group, like Gen Z and late millennials. They either understand pop culture or are looking out for pop culture content. The platform doesn’t want to restrict itself to just Tier-I and II cities, but also reach out to creators and users across India.

“In India, this particular target group is spending more time on inspiration-led commerce. Explosion of direct-to-consumers (D2C) brands in the country has also driven this trend. There are multiple brands, and consumers are looking for ways to discover new ones in categories like lifestyle, fashion, accessories and home décor. Music and fitness have also seen high user engagement,” informs Jain.

Roposo works with around 200 brands. Over the last few months, it has been a sort of a launch pad for many of these brands. Jain believes that Roposo has integrated with Glance well in order to get the required scale in India. Glance is present in over 189 million lock screens in India.

Elaborating on the competitive landscape, Jain says that Roposo is creating a new category. The space is relatively new in India and hasn’t been explored by any other player yet.